My perennial complaint about David Brooks is that he absolves himself of all responsibility for everything always. Every so often he looks around and is dumbfounded at the condition of the Republican Party or the American right, and then he accurately describes this deplorable condition before moving on and behaving as if there’s no real crisis. Then something new appalls him and the cycle begins again.
I did my definitive takedown of Brooks over five years ago (“Letting this man contemplate the great moral questions in public is exactly like handing a three year old a running chainsaw.”), and I stand by that work. As someone who said in 2007 that “the foray into Iraq was one of the noblest endeavors the United States, or any great power, has ever undertaken,” it’s probably hard for Brooks to understand how the lies that led to that adventure could have also led to Sarah Palin or Donald Trump. After all, he helped to tell those lies. He’s accountable.
As of today, he’s alarmed to discover that the movement that has fed him and that he has served is acting like a Hale-Bopp comet death cult.
It’s as if the Trump base felt some security when their man was at the top, and that’s now gone. Maybe Trump was the restraining force.
What’s happening can only be called a venomous panic attack. Since the election, large swathes of the Trumpian right have decided America is facing a crisis like never before and they are the small army of warriors fighting with Alamo-level desperation to ensure the survival of the country as they conceive it.
Where David Brooks, a bookish kid raised in a Jewish family in Manhattan and Philadelphia’s Main Line, thinks he fits in the right’s vision of the future is a good question. He isn’t welcome in the Anglo-Saxon caucus, that’s for sure. What’s unclear is why he couldn’t see these stormtroopers coming from miles away.
The thing is, he does see them on a fairly regular basis. And then he forgets about them, perhaps because he has no role if his role isn’t placed somewhere on the right side of the political spectrum.
So, he manages to write about this “venomous panic attack” fueled by “Alamo-level desperation” without once mentioning that it’s all about white supremacy. I’m talking the old school kind, too, not the type that makes allowances for people who can pass for white but aren’t “Anglo-Saxon.”
I’m long past the point of giving Brooks allowances to figure this out on his own time. His column on this would be good if I didn’t know he’d be acting like he’d never written by early next week.
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You can pretty much just defer to Driftglass on David Fucking Brooks.
It’s not that Brooks “forgets” about the past. It’s that he’s actively trying to Memoryhole™ the past, so he can continue getting paid by the multiple organizations that publish his writing and have him on the TV machines.
It’s all about money.
Next week he’ll be going off on the “woke mob” or whatever other boogieman on the left he’s currently getting paid to scapegoat so the actual NAZIs on the right can continue destroying the country.
Rinse, repeat, direct deposit.
It’s money yes, but also just having a career at all.
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Of course, the Alamo defense is considered heroic.
I have said this on teh twitter and so I’ll say it again here:
Democrats really got suckered this time, I think.
For two months after the 2020 election, it was all “oh just give Trump a little more time, he’ll come around!” and “of course we all know Biden really did win the election but don’t say it too loudly because it will just hurt the poor Republicans’ tender feelings and can’t we all just get along!”
Meanwhile, they were plotting and planning and now they’re passing law after law to make sure they can overturn future Democratic wins. The way things are going, I think Democrats will find that Jan 6 was just the beginning. Now the votes in Arizona are being recounted and, while I don’t think they will be brazen enough to actually overturn Biden’s win, well, surprise surprise, it will turn out that there was just SO MUCH FRAUD that its maybe sorta kinda likely that Trump really deserved to get thousands more votes….
Slipstreaming in behind will be the supposedly “mainstream” columnists like Brooks, using their NYT platform to give credibility to these Trump enablers.
I don’t know where it will end, but I am very concerned about whether America will still have a functioning democracy by 2028.
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I see that n1cholas beat me to the “Driftglass on David Fucking Brooks” analysis. Republican Detachment Disorder, another Driftglass thought.
Nothing has changed. He reprehensible if if the violent revolution comes, his is one the first houses I go to.
Having said all that, this was an interesting take on DFB’s latest dribble:
https://twitter.com/johnastoehr/status/1385644860976164868
My take is that DFB is a “necessary evil” in moving the opinion of scared white people. I know anecdotally some friends who have abandoned the Republican Party although are still Republicans and read DFB and are influenced by him. Sad but true.
Unfortunately there are many Democrats in my circle who like themselves some Brooks… is it his polish, his polite manners? I think it is a delusional belief that we can all get along…
DFB gave the commencement address at Occidental’s graduation class of 2010 – we had a friend’s son graduating from that class. Mercifully we did not get invited to the commencement, only the celebratory luncheon afterwards.
He had a marvelous gig on NPR (I have stopped watching – so he probably still does).. providing softly spoken balance!
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Let me fix that headline for you: Wanker: David Brooks.
Just drop the “of the day” because it basically never changes.
He is not redeemable. I have boycotted his work since a horribly racist and ignorant column about Haiti a month after the earthquake.
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